Although chances of an Ebola outbreak in the Commonwealth are slim, the Kentucky Hospital Association is spreading information about how to handle a patient with the disease.
KHA Emergency Preparedness and Trauma Coordinator Dick Bartlett said people most likely to contract the disease are those such as soldiers or humanitarian workers who have been in a country with an outbreak.
“They are now going to start being screened at the major airports, which are usually the points of reception for the international flights coming in,” he said. “They’ll be screened for where they’ve been, signs and symptoms and other travel history. So the likelihood of those kind of folks getting on subsequent flights and arriving in western Kentucky are extremely low.”
Bartlett encouraged people who have traveled to countries with an Ebola outbreak to monitor their temperature and look for symptoms for 21 days after leaving the area. But he said diseases caught in other countries are often malaria, not Ebola,
Even after the first death in America from this Ebola outbreak, Bartlett said people should not be too concerned about the disease.
“No one yet has had secondary infection as a result of contact with Mr. (Thomas Eric) Duncan down in Dallas,” he said. “So that should give us some reassurance that this is not an easy thing to get, and it’s not a very hardy virus.”
Bartlett said the infection control cleaners hospital use kill the virus, as does diluted bleach and alcohol.
The areas hardest hit by the disease are West African countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, and some in central Africa. The World Health Organization has also begun to see a drop in the number of Ebola cases there in recent days.
